High-performance direct solution of finite element problems on multi-core processors

Finite element method;High-performance computing;Multi-core;Direct sparse solvers;Fill-in reduction

Guney, Murat Efe ; Civil and Environmental Engineering

University:Georgia Institute of Technology

Department:Civil and Environmental Engineering

关键词: Finite element method;    High-performance computing;    Multi-core;    Direct sparse solvers;    Fill-in reduction;   

Others  :  https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/1853/34662/1/guney_murat_e_201008_phd.pdf

美国|英语

来源: SMARTech Repository

【 摘 要 】

A direct solution procedure is proposed and developed which exploits the parallelism that exists in current symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) multi-core processors. Several algorithms are proposed and developed to improve the performance of the direct solution of FE problems. A high-performance sparse direct solver is developed which allows experimentation with the newly developed and existing algorithms. The performance of the algorithms is investigated using a large set of FE problems. Furthermore, operation count estimations are developed to further assess various algorithms. An out-of-core version of the solver is developed to reduce the memory requirements for the solution. I/O is performed asynchronously without blocking the thread that makes the I/O request. Asynchronous I/O allows overlapping factorization and triangular solution computations with I/O. The performance of the developed solver is demonstrated on a large number of test problems. A problem with nearly 10 million degree of freedoms is solved on a low price desktop computer using the out-of-core version of the direct solver. Furthermore, the developed solver usually outperforms a commonly used shared memory solver.